Alex Martelli wrote "Python in a Nutshell" and co-edited "Python Cookbook". He's a PSF fellow, and won the 2002 Activators' Choice Award and the 2006 Frank Willison Award for contributions to the Python community.

He works as Senior Staff Engineer for Google, currently Tech Lead of "1:many" support for Google Cloud Platform products. You can read some "PDFs":http://www.aleax.it/ and watch some "videos":http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=alex+martelli of his past presentations.